There’s a difference between wanting to have good credit so that you can benefit from a garbage system and wanting that system to exist in the first place.
I’m a leftist who dislikes capitalism, but I can admit that credit scores were a step up from the way loans were done before. The old way just made it so the banks themselves decided who they wanted to issue a loan to, and that led to a lot of racism and sexism when it came to giving the loans out.
Still, I do think we can come up with a better system than the current credit score system, and I think you have the right idea to point out it’s flaws to start the wheels turning on improving it.
your conclusion doesn’t follow from your premise. the ability to live indoors is going to be important to people even if they think the system by which we decide who is allowed to live indoors is kinda shit.
I’m honestly unsure. What is the alternative? Instead of a pre-emptive risk assessment of whether or not you can pay something, more people just receive punishments when they end up not being able to? I don’t like being judged or told what I can or cannot pay back a month from now, but on a large scale doesn’t this mostly protect people from dangerous debts? For the opponents, what is the proposed alternative?
on a large scale doesn’t this mostly protect people from dangerous debts?
Not really. It just ends up with lenders offering far more predatory interest rates, which worsens the situation for the debtor. The system is set up in such a way that you can spiral pretty hard with a single misstep.
For the opponents, what is the proposed alternative?
I’d imagine this is the crux of the problem. Banks need some way to determine if someone will pay back their loans, and what better way than to tabulate their history of doing just that? Should banks be willing to take risks in a system with stuff like the 7 year rule?
If it was about the ability to pay back loans, then why does it go down when I finish paying the loan? Its about your ability to pay as much interest as possible.
Part of your credit score is also the present. It’s more than a bit predatory, but not having any current financial responsibilities looks bad. For example, if you have no loans whatsoever but paid back a bunch in the past, there’s little evidence saying you can currently pay them off. At least, that’s the theory of it.
Given that there are plenty of developed countries where credit scores don’t exist (and plenty more where they do but only for businesses), I think alternatives are imaginable. I would know, I live in one such country.
If you want a mortgage here, the bank will:
Ask you about your current loans and potential past defaults
Ask you about your current and past income, marital status, employment status, etc.
Use those variables to pretty straightforwardly determine your loan capacity
I think do a background check in national databases for defaults/“bad payer” status
Contractually obligate you to receive your salary on the same account from which they will automatically pull the mortgage. I don’t think this helps reduce actual defaults much, but it probably greatly reduces the financial and administrative overhead of late/missed payments. Also this ties you into the creditor bank which is good for business, IDK how standard that practice is abroad.
The US consumer economy is very highly dependent on short-term/credit debt, and that is absolutely crazy to me. Some Americans say they “need” a credit card to defer payment on some purchases, and as someone raised in culture where debit is king this sounds absolutely insane. Y’all have been propagandized, here it is perfectly normal to not have a single credit line open before shopping for a mortgage and if anything your banker will commend you for it.
I’d like credit scores systems to be fully public and developed by the government. It would be far better than the three private systems Americans deal with now.
Four*. FICO is another one and at one time was most commonly used for home mortgages. Not sure how true that is today, but it’s still very much in use.
I use msys2 (www.msys2.org), it uses pacman as its package manager and has a lot of developer packages (so i can compile fortran and integrating it to python). It comes with bash and a terminal, but I used windows terminal and made a profile for using msys2’s bash, the same on vscode. Then I installed neofetch (packages.msys2.org/base/neofetch) and just saw this hahaha.
Someone else already said WSL, but before WSL there was Cygwin, and before Cygwin it was probably the DOS era tbh, but you could definitely get pdksh as a DOS executable back then. (I was never quite brave enough to make pdksh the SHELL in CONFIG.SYS, but I could have.)
As for Windows' WM being Explorer, yeah, that's basically been the case since Windows 95. The desktop itself is a special instance of a folder and the taskbar, at least up to Windows 7 (I've been out of touch since then) was a heavily modified partially-floating menu bar.
Prior to that, Windows 3.x had something called Program Manager which Windows 8 kind of, sort of, went back to (but not really) and everyone hated it. The original Program Manager would have been better, honestly.
Makes me wonder if the setting is still there in modern Windows to change the WM to something else. It used to be in WIN.INI, so it's probably a registry key now. No doubt deep instability will result if it's set to anything other than explorer.exe because of the deep integration that explorer.exe has with literally everything, so probably not worth trying. Also, if you start Explorer when it isn't the WM, it'll probably try to do WM things anyway and break whatever else is running.
As far as switching out Explorer goes, it’s not actually the window manager, that’s Aero since Vista - but it is the shell on desktop editions of Windows… But not all editions. Some server editions (“core”) and some specialized other ones have the shell set to literally just a cmd window. There’s no taskbar, no Start, no desktop icons, etc. There’s a cmd window that if closed triggers a reboot. Of course other things can be started from it.
I’m not sure if there’s a setting that could be changed to make a desktop edition behave like that or vice versa.
DOS was ok, but when I found Linux with its cli multiprocessing, &, bg, fg, jobs, and alt-f#, my head exploded and I thought about all the time I could have saved in my years of using DOS with its single process terminal interface.
Meanwhile insurance scores in the US gather all sorts of opaque behavioral data via data brokers. And the IMF even thinks you’re browser history should influence your credit score.
China is having some of the same wages/productivity split problems that the us has and there’s a vein of thought that says it’s fixable with social incentive programs.
This isn’t 1984 evil authoritarian tankie shit, its liberal reform shit.
And as another reply to you mentioned, a lot of the “social” factors are reported to the big 3 credit reporting agencies through denials based on giant weird datasets anyway, so the “normal” credit score is a “social” credit score in disguise.
Incorrect, the Social Credit system was started in 2014 and intended to operate at full scale before 2020 but it’s still not there, yet. It’s been in use for over a decade, just not as much as the CCP wants it to be.
What’s that? You don’t think you should have a score that keeps track of everyone’s mundane behaviors and ranks them? But what if I want to cross the street between crosswalks, or need to spit, or feel like criticizing the government? Anybody who does those things should be banned from even buying groceries, or having children. Maybe we should send the death van.
+1 for using LTSC with MAS activation. It’s about the only acceptable way to run windows at home, other than doing the same thing but in an isolated VM.
The sadder thing is that Chinese social credit hasn’t actually even been implemented, and doesn’t seem like it’s going to. There are only limited local experiments, most of which are allegedly largely irrelevant.
Whereas there are multiple credit score companies currently tracking literally everyone who has a bank account.
It has been implemented, just not at the full scale they originally planned. It started in 2014 and was supposed to be finished by 2020, but has received a lot of pushback and controversies. There are people who are not allowed to fly on a plane, take a train, make a large purchase, or attend certain events in China, that is an undeniable fact.
One of the most well known examples is Xu Xiaodong, a MMA fighter who set out on a journey to expose fake Kung Fu Mystics by challenging them to fights. He relies completely on other individuals to travel, and has to send his videos overseas to be uploaded online because otherwise they get censored by the CCP.
Your comment got me thinking… Is this a big deal, or even a small deal?
I think it’s a deal of some proportion. If someone is trying out Linux for the first time and stumbles across how Flatpaks work and starts exploring Flathub, maybe their initial impression will be good enough to consider switching. If something appears to be polished, then maybe it is.
Perception is reality; while hardcore nerds are willing to roll their own distributions, there’s a reason Ubuntu is damn popular. Most normal people want their computers to work, and to have an easy discoverable ecosystem.
I’ve explained in another comment. They have these pages that seem arbitrarily made up to fulfill certain needs but not others.
You can get a list of packages sorted by popularity and with paging, but no filtering.
You can get a list of packages with filtering but it’s limited to 1,000 packages for some reason, no pagination, and no sorting.
The way to find these lists is really unintuitive (go on, try to find the second one I mentioned).
There’s no package count, unless you find the filter page and add up certain categories (I’m guessing they have about 2,600 packages but it’s just a guess).
I have no idea why they can’t just put everything I mentioned in one place. There’s no reason they can’t have a page with search, categories, sorting, pagination, and counts. I struggle to think why this one page can’t be the homepage (with whatever defaults they think it makes most sense, like most popular packages first by default).
Having a homepage that only shows a handful of categories and a handful of apps in those categories really hurts discoverability. You’ll never be able to find an app like Stellarium for example if you don’t already know its name – and this applies to the vast majority of those 2,600 apps, and it will only get worse as they add more.
I’m guessing they made this design back when they had very few apps, took a lot of time to release it, and by the time they did it was already outdated.
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